The Politics of Religion in the Ukraine: the Orthodox Church and the Ukrainian Revolution, 1917-1919
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NOT FOR CITATION WITHOUT PERMISSION OF AUTHOR #202 THE POLITICS OF RELIGION IN THE UKRAINE: THE ORTHODOX CHURCH AND THE UKRAINIAN REVOLUTION, 1917-1919 Bohdan R. Bociurkiw Professor of Political Science Carleton University, Ottawa This paper, which was originally presented at a colloquium of the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies on September 19, 1985, is part of a forthcoming monograph entitled The PoLitics of Religion in the Ukraine: The Orthodox Church, the State, and SociaL Change, 1917-1982. Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars The following essay was prepared and distributed by the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies as part of its Occasional Paper series. The series aims to extend Kennan Institute Occasional Papers to all those interested in Russian and Soviet studies and to help authors obtain timely feedback on their work. Occasional Papers are written by Kennan Institute scholars and visiting speakers. They are working papers presented at, or resulting from, seminars, colloquia, and conferences held under the auspices of the Kennan Institute. Copies of Occasional Papers and a list of Occasional Papers currently available can be obtained free of charge by writing to: Occasional Papers Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars Smithsonian Institution 955 L'Enfant Plaza, Suite 7400 Washington, D.C. 20560 The Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies was established in 1975 as a program of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. The Kennan Institute was created to provide a center in Washington, D.C., where advanced research on Russia and the USSR could be pursued by qualified U.S. and foreign scholars, where encouragement and support could be given to the cultivation of Russian and Soviet studies throughout the United States , and where contact could be maintained with similar institutions abroad. The Kennan Institute also seeks to provide a meeting place for scholars, government officials and analysts, and other specialists on Russia and the Soviet Union. This effort to bridge the gap between academic and public affairs has resulted in novel and stimulating approaches to a wide range of topics. The Kennan Institute is supported by con tribu tions from foundations, corporations , individuals , and the United States government. Contents Acknowledgments vii The Rise of the Ukrainian Church Movement 1 Political Developments in the Ukraine 1 The Impact of the Revolution on the Church in the Ukraine 4 Diocesan Congresses in the Ukraine 5 Frustrated Hopes and the Sharpening of the Ukrainian-Russian Conflict within the Church 7 The Ukrainian Church Movement and the Parties of the Central Rada 10 The Formation of the Tserkovna Rada and the Convocation of the All-Ukrainian Sobor 13 The Establishment of the All-Ukrainian Church Council 13 The All-Ukrainian Sobor 17 The Church under the Hetman Regime 19 The Ecclesiastical Policy of the Hetmanate and the Reassertion of the Russian Orientation in the Church 20 The Summer Session of the Sobor and the Adoption of the Statute for the Ukrainian Church 21 The Ukrainian Reaction to the Sobor and a Shift in the Government's Church Policy 25 Another Reversal in the Hetman's Policy: The Proclamation of Federation with Russia 29 The Directory and the Autocephaly of the Ukrainian Church The Invasion of the Ukraine by the Bolshevik and White Armies 34 The Ministry of Confessions under Professor Ohienko and Its Efforts to Implement the Law on Autocephaly 36 Conclusions and Reflections 38 Transliteration of Geographical Names 43 Table 1: Orthodox Dioceses in the Ukraine, 1915 44 Map: The Ukrainian Lands in 1917-1921 46 Notes 47 Acknowledgments I would like to extend my appreciation to the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars for a 1984-85 fellowship in aid of my monograph, The Politics of Religion in the Ukraine: The Orthodox Church, the State, and Social. Change, 1917-1982, of which this paper is a part. I would also like to thank my research assistants at the Kennan Institute, Laura Cassedy, Julie Moffett, and Amy Rutledge, and my research assistant at Carleton University, Christine Chudchak. My thanks are also due to Carleton University in Ottawa for providing me with a sabbatical to work on this study; to the Hoover Institution for a grant that enabled me to examine its library and archive holdings during the summer of 1984; and to the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta for its additional support of this project. This paper, which corresponds to chapter two of my forthcoming monograph, draws in part on my earlier article, "The Church and the Ukrainian Revolution: The Central Rada Period."* While most of my research during 1984-85 was done at the Library of Congress, much of the documentation for this study was assembled over the years at numerous other libraries and archives, including the Pontifical Institute of Oriental Studies in Rome; the British Museum and the London School of Economics and Political Science; the East European Seminar of Tuebingen University; the Public Library of the University of Basel; the Bavarian State Library; the Library of Contemporary International Documentation in Paris; Warsaw University Library; New York Public Library; Columbia University Library and its Archive of Russian and East European History and Culture; the Library of the Ukrainian Free Academy of Arts and Sciences in New York; the Library and Archive of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in the U.S., South Bound Brook, New Jersey; the libraries of Harvard University, the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, the University of Alberta, Carleton University, and St. Andrew 1 s College at the University of Manitoba; the Library and Archive of the Ukrainian Cultural-Educational Centre, Winnipeg; and the archives of the late Metropolitan Ilarion (Ohienko) of Winnipeg, Metropolitan Ivan Teodorovych in Philadelphia, and Archbishop Ievhen (Bachynskyi) of Bule, Switzerland, the latter now held in the Batchinsky Collection, Special Collections, at the Carleton University Library in Ottawa. Special thanks are also due to my former research assistant at Carleton University, John Jaworsky, for his valuable assistance at various stages of this project. *"The Church and the Ukrainian Revolution: The Central Rada Period, u in T. Hunchak {ed.}, The UkraineJ 1917-1921: A Study in Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977}. vii The Rise of the Ukrainian Church Movement The revolution of March 1917,* which overthrew the tsarist regime and instituted a short-lived diarchy of the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, started a chain of events that shook the very foundations of the Russian Orthodox Church and profoundly affected its internal organization, its legal and economic position, and its relationship to the state. In the Ukraine, as in other borderlands of the Russian Empire, political and social upheavals coalesced with a national revolution, resulting in the rise of an autonomous national government, and after the Bolshevik overthrow of the Provisional Government, in the Ukraine's ultimate, if not long-lasting, secession from the Russian state. Moscow's hegemony was challenged in the ecclesiastical realm as well. In March, after more than a century of Russian domination, the Georgian Orthodox Church unilaterally proclaimed its autocephaly and was promptly recognized by the Provisional Government despite prates ts from the Holy Synod. 1 In the Ukraine, resurgent Ukrainian nationalism took the form of an increasingly vocal, if predominantly lay, movement for the de-Russification of the local Orthodox Church. 2 This presented the newly restored Patriarchate of Moscow with a new and urgent problem of national self-determination within the Church. For reasons to be discussed below, the Russian Church was neither prepared nor willing to solve this problem to the satisfaction of the Ukrainian national movement. Thus denied a canonical solution to its demands, the Ukrainian national movement turned to extra-canonical means, including the intervention of successive Ukrainian governments, in its endeavors to realize the objective of an autocephalous national church. Political Developments in the Ukraine The collapse of the old political order released the hitherto repressed forces of Ukrainian nationalism, which in turn accelerated the crystallization of a new sense of Ukrainian national identity among the ever growing number of yesterday's "Little Russians," nsouth Russians,tt or simply khokh1.y.3 Misunderstood by Russian public opinion and contemptuously dismissed by Ukrainophobic newspapers such as Kievl.ianin as a foreign-inspired aberration, the dynamics of the Ukrainian "national awakening" not only threatened the dominant position of Russians and assimilated non-Russians in the political, social, and ecclesiastical realms, but it challenged the basic tenets of the established notions of Russian nationality, its historical legacy, and territorial patrimony. With the lifting of old restrictions on the freedom of speech, press, and association, the principle vehicles for Ukrainian nation-building the rapidly growing Ukrainian press led by the Kiev daily Nova rada; newly legalized or newly-formed Ukrainian political parties, predominantly socialist in orientation;5 mushrooming cultural,